The People’s Privacy Act: How you can help protect Washingtonians’ privacy
For the third year in a row, tech companies and their allies are pushing a weak, corporate-centric “consumer privacy” bill here in Washington state. This time, though, there’s an alternative!
Indivisible organizations around the state have signed on in support of the People’s Privacy Act, introduced by Rep. Shelley Kloba with bi-partisan support. The People’s Privacy Act was developed by the ACLU of Washington in collaboration with the Tech Equity Collective (a group of civil liberties and civil rights-focused organizations and individuals working to hold technology accountable) with a goal of protecting people, not corporations.
Last week, Jennifer Lee and Savannah Sly of ACLU of Washington joined Washington Indivisible Network and Indivisible Plus Washington for a webinar on how activists can help support the People’s Privacy Act. We also talked about about SB 5116, the Automated Decision Systems bill, and the weak, industry-backed SB 5062 (the Bad Washington Privacy Act).
Here‘s a link to the slides (also at the top of the post). And here’s the video (also available on Facebook and YouTube)
Since the webinar, The State Government and Elections committee gave a “do pass” recommendation to SB 5116, so this ground breaking bill has advanced to the Ways and Means committee. Good news!
And the Seattle Times published Jennifer Lee’s op-ed The People’s Privacy Act, not the Washington Privacy Act, is the better bill to protect consumers’ civil rights and civil liberties. Also good news! Share it with your friends!
Take action!
Here are a couple of links that make it easy to ask your legislators to protect our privacy
- Pass The People’s Privacy Act
- Ask Ways & Means to add a private right of action to SB 5062
- Stop SB 5062 (the weak, corporate-friendly Washington Privacy Act)
You can also help by writing letters to the editor. The ACLU has a helpful People’s Privacy Act: Letter to the Editor Toolkit.
Going forward, we’ll be using Take Action Network (TAN) for many of our actions. TAN makes it easy to email or phone your legislators, find events, and do many other things activists need to do. Here’s a short orientation for activists.
You can see our current TAN actions on the People’s Privacy Act, SB 5062, and Automated Decision Systems using this search. Most actions have scripts; you can easily pull them up in email as a draft, or use them to phone your legislators. Sometimes, actions link directly to the legislators site or an alert from another the Tech Equity Coalition group.
You can share your address if you want (so TAN knows who your legislators are), or even sign up for an account and get automatic email notifications when new actions are available. For a signup link to Take Action Network, please fill out this short form.
Find out more!
Here’s some links with more information
- The People’s Privacy Act, not the Washington Privacy Act, is the better bill to protect consumers’ civil rights and civil liberties is an op-ed by Jennifer Lee in the Seattle Times. Share it with your friends!
- Introducing the People’s Privacy Act, on the ACLU site, has a high-level description of the legislation.
- The Harms of Data Abuse, on ACLU of Washington’s site, has real-world examples of how people are being hurt today by companies invading their privacy — the kind of abuse that the People’s Privacy Act has been designed to stop.
- Comparison between the People’s Privacy Act and SB 5062 looks at some of the differences between these bills
- The illusion of protection and the Bad Washington Privacy Act (SB 5062), by Jon Pincus on jedii.tech, is a detailed look and where SB 5062 falls short.
